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The Settlers III (Any %) (Single Segment)

Decision: Accept

Congratulations to 'knoll3'!
Thread title:  
Run Information

The Settlers III (Any %) (Single Segment)

Verification Files

http://v.speeddemosarchive.com/settlers3romans/

Please refer to the Verification Guidelines before posting. Verifications are due by Oct. 9, 2014.

Please post your opinions about the run and be certain to conclude your post with a verdict (Accept/Reject). This is not a contest where the majority wins - I will judge each verification on its content. Please keep your verification brief unless you have a good reason otherwise.

After 2 weeks I will read all of the verifications and move this thread to the main verification board and post my verdict.
Edit history:
Alko: 2014-09-30 04:44:51 pm
Alko: 2014-09-28 04:24:59 pm
Alko: 2014-09-27 11:01:19 am
Caution: This user contains Kana ^_^
So glad that someone decided to run this game =D Even though I'm still an early-born one and play(ed) a lot more of Settlers II O:-)

general comments: There's a key (was it F12? F10? one of those right side F-key) which lets you skip one minute of ingame time. The screen picture will move on and the game will consider the minute passed to have no human input. Afaict, this wasn't used in this run. Is there an admin ruling allowing/disallowing the use of that key?
There's a framerate counter (so I assume) in the lower left and a timer running in the lower right. I can't recall the timer being part of the game, and I know for sure that the framerate display is not. I hope that's not a ground for rejection by itself.
Anyhow, to the missions.
Mission 1: Lolpwned (not much to be said here, looking good and quick, if only the soldiers would march faster ~.~)

Mission 2: The game wants to introduce you to overseas travelling, so most of the stuff you need to win is on your main island, while the opponents you need to beat are on the other, larger island. Yeah, it sucks, I know. You want to build a ship as fast as possible, which is what the runner does. While waiting for the ship to be built, there's a lot of dead time with no inputs, which look like perfect use of the minute-skipping key.
If only the soldiers weren't so stupid and could get on the ship quicker … well, whatever.
Yellow falls, and the soldiers march back to get healed. It was always a pain to get them lined up to where they would actually get healed, them bastards ~.~ Runner doesn't care if they're all green, which will make it faster. Off they march to beat blue. Again, blue doesn't stand a chance.

Mission 3: Runner consolidates what he has on his main island while sending out the initial forces eastward. Lots of dead air time (again) that might be filled with the minute-skip F-key.
Walk to the Egyptian~
Very nice use of the tower strats explained in the comments.
By the way, the yellow one you can see there is one you want to stay we~ll clear of, because he's damn OP in this mission. You only need to beat green and blue. His parallel management of fighting green and blue isn't always the fastest, but it's usually decent, so I won't complain (multi-tasking is hard =O)

Mission 4: Another brute force strike to win the yellow tower. Splits yellows territory into two rendering him handicapped. Thankfully, that also means getting yellow's unused weapons, so once we have the soldier-creating building, we can build up a humungous army x3 And off they march … Yellow is no longer a match so we turn to blue. And blue isn't any match for us either, so they are both annihilated. Mission won.
The thieves are only there to check on what the opponents are doing. You only see what's happening if one of your minions is there … in the predecessor, you saw everything you were able to see once. The helpers you can see at the border changing colour once they enter another territory are enemy thieves, btway. They are only revealed if a soldier comes close to them. But we can ignore them.
I distinctly remember something like eight piles of gold to be lying around to the West of your territory. Is it not worth it to get them? They would make your soldiers stronger, right? I think, pioneers would suffice, correct?

Mission 5: This mission could be called island hopping. Everything you need to conquer is on different islands, so you need lots of ferries. And also lots of soldiers. It's nice to know that there are weapons lying around in the open that the player just steals and brings home, while he's waiting to be strong enough =D. After that, he starts his brute force attacks. And lol to the troll soldier disembarking on the smallest island there and getting stuck 8D. Once orange, green and yellow are beaten, the mission's won.

Mission 6: We 'pick up' where the former mission 'left off' … so the game decides to give us all sorts of buildings we have never seen before. Which also means you can witness agriculture. But they're hardly used, it's just build ferries, transfer soldiers and brute force away yellow using the tower strat to one's advantage. Note how yellow has turned from a Chinese into an Egyptian in this mission x3

Mission 7: This mission is special in that you already have enough soldiers at the beginning to win it. That's why he's just going around, randomly destroying towers to get his soldiers together. You only need to win the peninsula, you don't have to beat yellow; thankfully =3

Mission 8: Get ready for the final mission, folks! Again, it's all about demolishing your own towers, rounding up your own soldiers and then overrunning blue. It's important to do that in a parallel way to save time, which the runner nicely displays. This concludes the Romans campaign, individual levels (so I would call it).

Video of the HQ was good, audio was good for mission 8 (I had music running for the other ones, but I didn't notice any sounds that shouldn't have been there). I could not detect any instances of cheating.

The only real criticism I would have is the runner not using the skip-a-minute in missions two and three, but I don't think that's enough to make it reject-worthy. A minor nitpick would be the runner not going for the free gold in mission four (he does have time to do so, afaics) but again, that's not much and probably hardly affects the run as a whole. So I'm going to give these an accept.
to answer your question Alko --> not to use the key was my own decision, cause i dont want to make a mistake which is InGame. So i know it hurts to look minutes of waiting and nothing happend, but i think it's ok. Other thing is that the minute is gone and u dont have the choice to send soldiers to another point or build another building. No one told me not to use. (yeah it's F12 key)

The other thing (framerate) is from my record programm (fraps). It makes sure that i am acutally recording. So it is always in the left down corner, but i dont think that's a problem for the viwers, cause nothing of the screenplay is cuttet. Well i hope too, that the timeframe of the rcord programm "fraps" is a reason to reject, otherwise it will be a bit serious.

So far, if there are other questions pls post them and i try to give an answer.
well, happy watching!
greetz
knoll3
Caution: This user contains Kana ^_^
Question to knoll3 just out of curiosity: Why does it say you're not allowed to demolish the tower in mission 4? Because there are enemy soldiers in the area?
well i dont no exactly what you mean. but if u mean the situation at 2:40 Minutes --> this can happend when a enemy soldier wants to attack your tower you just captured. So kill these soldiers and you are able to demolish the tower at least! :-). Hope this answer help you. I think this situation comes a few more times in the next videos, so dont worry, it's a normal thing!

greetz
knoll3
Edit history:
LotBlind: 2014-10-11 10:54:29 am
LotBlind: 2014-10-09 11:33:30 am
LotBlind: 2014-10-08 02:13:11 pm
LotBlind: 2014-10-07 12:58:54 pm
LotBlind: 2014-10-07 12:58:35 pm
LotBlind: 2014-10-06 12:40:46 pm
LotBlind: 2014-10-06 12:40:22 pm
DONE

FPS meter showing bottom left, otherwise AV is okay. The file names were a bit weird this time, every mission had the same exact name which was a little inconvenient for those wanting to download more than one on one go.

Nice strategy of walling enemy soldiers off to get free damage in.

In some missions time could be saved by using minimap clicking more systematically. You can quickly send a boat out in the approximate direction if you need to micro several things at once, then correct its heading later if necessary.

Another strategy that might speed up some parts is starting to build something unnecessary and canceling it just to attract workers to places where they'll actually be needed shortly. I don't know if that even works though.

MISSION PER MISSION:

2
6:24
could have microed the last soldier to get to the boat faster?
7:54
took another half minute to collect the last two soldiers... does this really save half a minute in more efficient fighting? Especially seeing as they would have joined the assault on blue anyway.

4
knoll, you never answered Alko's question about some gold...
6:30
Given that the land they were claiming is soon to be encompassed by the tower's radius, the workers are not being useful here. Instead they should have been sent closer to the border of the top territory so their efforts are sure not to be wasted. Don't know if this affects the mission time though because it may not have been the bottleneck.
22:00-23:00
Correct me if there's something I don't know about the game... but it looks like most of the soldiers are doing jack squat during the assault on yellow here. Should have sent most of the soldiers towards blue way earlier? The assault on blue, I feel, was taking it more safe than was necessary although I suppose having a large mass of soldiers enables more efficient trades + using the walling-off trick. How about attacking from the east instead of south, taking care of the mobile part of blue's army and splitting up into task forces earlier? It seems only a few soldiers are actually needed per tower if all of them are going to have the minimal one-soldier garrison left. Making sure a part of your army is always advancing further into their territory would probably have yielded a faster time methinks.

5
generally: you're sending the boats over to the right into the bay to unload the thieves there but it seemed to me they walked at the same speed as the boat sailed so wouldn't it have been a [slightly] shorter way to the goods if you had unloaded them to the south end of the island and sent them walking? Is there some risk with that? Do they attract hostility? Actually you do this at 9:15 or so... why do they walk along the coast though? That's weird.
24:00
Towards the end of the mission the micro is getting better. e.g.  At this time splitting the soldiers works nicely.
32:38
loloololol
OVERALL this mission is okay, could probably save a minute on even better micro but it's okay.

6
6:30
Here you DO micro the soldiers closer to the ship before it's finished.

Overall I'm left with a good feeling about this mission.

7
I started wondering if it's possible to lure the tower defenders away from the door by just backing off a little ways in order to be able to get more men hacking at them at once? Another idea would be to select your strongest soldiers to fight first in case that makes tower-capturing any faster.

8
Why can't you send all your soldiers in at once before the castle and large tower are taken?


Finally - using the time warp key might classify as "major skips" because it changes the nature of the run in a massive way.

This run is good enough as is. The weakest missions are maybe 2 and 4.

accept
Edit history:
knoll3: 2014-10-12 03:20:19 am
knoll3: 2014-10-09 01:44:39 am
First of all --> thanks for watching LotBlind and take your comments!

To Mission Two!
yeah, to micro some units will be more efficent, but you got most of the time soldiers who had their on ideas ;-)
I tried sometimes without these last soldiers, but they were good blockers to stop yellow. Maybe you can win against him without these two and be faster, but i wanna play it safe. So, i am looking forward to an improvemt by you ;).

Mission four!
Well, i dont remember any gold which is lying around in this mission, but i will look it up and give an answer.
6:30
yeah right, some workers are in the territory which is soon be enclosed by the tower, so they can be send near to the border. Otherwise they are needed here, cause with the tower you dont get the full size to link both lands.
22:00- 23:00
totaly right, i should split my army into two sections. one, enough for yellow and the rest to blue. it was waste time to go from the north (yellow) to the south of blue and not entering into the east. The thing was, that i want to have a enemy tower which is all alone. This was the one in the south of blue which is build up yet. But yeah, to be much faster it's nearly better to attack from the east.
You need about 10 or 15 soldiers to bring up a wall around a tower, but it depends on the army of your enemy.

Mission 5
you see that i send 2 boats to the east coast of green to grap some weapons. The special thing is that, boat can be stucked when they are trying to drive boat to boat. In that case you have to micro one ship backwards and the other into a corner or out of the way of the other to make a possible driverway. to avoid this i unloaded the thiefs "in the south".

Now i am thinking about split the whole army into two sections.. to attack green and orange simultaneously. But maybe a thing for another improvement!
greetz

Mission 7
So far i know, it isn't possible to fight more than two soldiers at once, but your right for next time i should maybe fight with the strongers first and sending some weak with them for getting damaged.

Mission 8
well i hope i understand you in the right meaning. It is good to keep soldiers out of the radius of bowmen. So u dont get damage from them. The Same at the Castle. There is a small line (radius) around the tower where the bowmen cant hit you. So dont bring them all near the tower and let them die as a pig by a butcher. If that's not what you are asking about, just explain yourself a bit more plz.

Thanks so far and your critisim is a way of doing it better next time.
knoll, i just finished: I revised a lot of my comments so you might wanna read again from the top.
Borderlands 2 Glitch Hunter/ router.
I have watched all the missions and due to Alko and Lots in depth evaluations I'll keep this short a to the point

A/V: fine the Fraps counter is nothing worth crying over it's in the same place on every video and isn't intrusive into the gameplay area.

Cheating: None

As discussed by Alko and Lot some strats could be improved but all-in-all its a nice run, not sure if it's incorrectly labeled as "Single Segment" or it IS actually single segment with menu-ing removed. If not then IL table.

Decision: ACCEPT
Quote from Judgy:
I have watched all the missions and due to Alko and Lots in depth evaluations I'll keep this short a to the point

A/V: fine the Fraps counter is nothing worth crying over it's in the same place on every video and isn't intrusive into the gameplay area.

Cheating: None

As discussed by Alko and Lot some strats could be improved but all-in-all its a nice run, not sure if it's incorrectly labeled as "Single Segment" or it IS actually single segment with menu-ing removed. If not then IL table.

Decision: ACCEPT


Thanks to Judgy for your comment. I have to say that i dont really dont know if it is "single segment" or it's "single segment wie menu-ing" But to my mind it doesn't matter :-)

greetz
knolle
Caution: This user contains Kana ^_^
Good point, Judgy. I think this should be labelled as an IL table. Don't know why I didn't mention that earlier o.o'
knoll:

mission 8
Yeah that answers the question I suppose, I didn't realize there was a safe zone (I thought it had something to do with the fact the structure is under assault). Did you consider taking the soldiers forwards towards the other towers earlier even if that was going to incur a few casualties?
well, that will be a good idea for an improvement. To know exactly how many soldiers you need and go ahead with the others to take the next one.... the stupid thing is that you never play the "same mission" twice. the AI (KI) doesnt do the same clicks in the next try! So the army of him can be sometime far away or near by... that's a little shit of this game....

Maybe improvemnt the next step i take if u dont wanna try ;-)
Thanks knoll for inviting me in but I'm knee-deep in a few things already Smiley
Regarding the F12 key: it looks like this game will use in-game time, and using the F12 key does not give an in-game time advantage, so it's okay that you chose not to use it. It's completely okay for a runner to avoid using a feature that does not optimize the final time and creates the possibility for errors (for example, by fast-forwarding through a part where human input was needed).

Regarding ILs vs segmented: does anything in this game carry over from level to level?
Edit history:
knoll3: 2014-10-19 07:04:33 am
yeah, it is a story from mission to mission with a text and a short minimap overview, but the thing is that fraps (or maybe i) cant record these things. So i only got the Mission by itself.
To be honest i dont know the difference between ILs and segement, maybe someone can help me out...

Here is a youtube video where someone gonna made it to record intro and preview!

greetz and a sunny sunday
knoll3
knoll3: the question is is the starting situation in each mission always the same? I think yes right?
Thx for giving an info LotBlind!

Well i can read this question in two forms...

1st. YES, if u play mission 1 till 8 u always got the same Situation at the beginning when you restart and restart and restart the mission (e.g. if u lose)! The same goods, soldiers etc.

2nd. NO, in every Mission u got different starting goods e.g. in Mission 1 you got gold in your territory in mission 2 u dont have gold... so in every mission there are different starting situations.. sometimes u got mines, gold, ore and sometimes u dont got these things.

well maybe it is not clear what i write ahead but there can be two sides of the question. I hope you understand what i want to say :-). Otherwise pls let me know so i can edit my bad english!
greetz
knolle
Heavy Metal Powered
Regarding number 2, isn't what you will find in the mountains completely RNG? If the layout, starting goods and goals are the same, that shall be enough, the rest can be considered RNG.
Knoll: did these 8 videos come from playing the game from start to finish in one sitting without retrying missions? Or did you retry each mission until you got a good time? (It's okay to answer in your native language, and we can use Google Translate, if that is easier for you.)
Caution: This user contains Kana ^_^
As far as I could ever tell: Nothing carries over from mission to mission; every mission has an entirely defined starting situation.
The 'variances' knoll's talking about are fixed. I.e. in mission two you start off with an iron and a coal mine, as can be seen in the beginning of the video. The mines weren't built before, it'll always be iron and coal, never gold.
The gold he's referring to for mission one is actual bars of gold lying around on the ground at the beginning of a mission. Being part of mission one, it does not carry over to mission two.

I wouldn't even be sure if the resources you find in the mountain be RNG in any way. For Settlers II, I know for a fact that resources were 100 % pre-defined. I would suspect it to be so for Settlers III, too, but I'm not sure. I do think that they implemented some kind of mechanism that the resources had to be found be geologists, before they could be exploited.
(Think about it: imagine a casual player in one of the later missions who does not find any iron or coal near his starting area. He's close to doomed.)
well, i dont play these 8 missions in one session.. i just tried as long as it takes to get the best and fastest way of winning the mission. So there have also some days past to get all missions as you can see now like i said in the planingthread. I dont finished them all in only one day. As you can see there is no save/load so every mission is from the beginning till the end. I hope this answer help you a bit of get the right "choice".

To Alko!
So far as i know --> the minerals are still at the same places in every mission. I played mission 5 a lot of times to get the right time. It's been always the same that at the mountain coal, iron and gold are in the same place like the try before. You can see that i dont search with the geologists in mission 3 for minerals i just build a iron mine, cause i know that there is iron (x-trys i used geologist to be honest). So yes there is a clear way and standard in every mission where the minerals are lying!

Hope to be helpful and good night
knolle
^^ I think that translates into ILs.
Thanks for the clarification. We're going to take this as an IL ("individual level") submission. Can one of you please provide a list of the mission names for this run? That will resolve the last remaining blocker on this verification.